Slavery, Rebellion, and Oroonoko 's Heterodox Archive

Abstract: Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko (1688) has occupied a peculiar literary historical position for much of its existence, hovering uneasily between fact and fiction, and apology and defense. But among the wide variety of interpretations to which it has been subjected, the tradition that weighs most heavily on Oroonoko is the one that foregrounds its author's putative loyalty to the Stuarts in order to read Oroonoko as a tragic allegory of dynastic betrayal grounded in its author's eye-witness recollections of the seven months she appears to have spent in Suriname. But the critical shibboleth that Oroonoko is an allegorical defense of Stuart kingship or even monarchy falters in the face of a critical detail without which the novel's very plot comes unhinged: Oroonoko puts into the hands of its enslaved African characters the moral authority of "just rebellion"—an ad hoc political doctrine and practice that emerged during the 1640s and 1650s. Derived from the tyrant/slave dyad that had dominated England's political imaginations during the civil wars and Interregnum, dissidents who opposed both monarchical and parliamentary authoritarianism had justified the civil wars by arguing that tyranny, by definition, enslaved people and thereby created a moral imperative for rebellion. Drawing on this tradition, Oroonoko rejects the claim that sovereignty, especially when it collapses into injustice, is entitled to the political obedience of those it governs. But what makes Oroonoko 's rejection of colonial tyranny so compelling is its canny ability to ground that rejection in what is best described as a heterodox archive—a body of evidence that both contests the critical orthodoxy of the novella's support for the Stuarts and, more importantly, resists the political justification of colonial autocracy rooted in the belief England was entitled to dominate those African and Indigenous communities it encountered as a "natural" consequence of its political and cultural "superiority." Using a hermeneutics of collectivity, Oroonoko draws on the interfaces in the often hostile colonial record—print publications, laws, and letters—to engage with questions of tyranny, slavery, rebellion, indigeneity, heritability, and political rights in such a way that the novella itself holds open an imaginative, epistemological, and moral space wherein those lost to the grotesque and violent exercise of colonial power might be triumphantly reclaimed as part of a community both witnessed and memorialized.